


best served cold

by Ladybug_21



Category: Broadchurch, Fleabag (TV)
Genre: Barrister Fleabag, Character Study, Fleabag Is Abby Thompson, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:55:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27633749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: Objectively, Fleabagknowsthat Ellie Miller is not her Godmother, however eerily identical. But, fuck it, defending Joe Miller just to spite the woman is gonna feel really bloody good, anyway.
Relationships: Claire & Fleabag (Fleabag)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	best served cold

**Author's Note:**

> So, um, _Fleabag_ and the ridiculously talented Phoebe Waller-Bridge have completely complicated all of my feelings about Abby Thompson from _Broadchurch_. Mostly because I spent the first three episodes of _Fleabag_ gleefully hating everyone (especially Olivia Colman's precious face!) and thinking, _Fleabag basically *is* Abby Thompson, if Abby were disbarred for legal ethics reasons and ended up running a guinea pig café while sleeping with a bunch of questionable men!_ And then I unexpectedly found myself sobbing during the conversation between Fleabag and the Bank Manager at the retreat, because wow, sudden emotional investment in all of these gloriously dysfunctional people... and hence, all of this.
> 
> I obviously own no rights to _Fleabag_ or to _Broadchurch_. I've also only seen the first season of _Fleabag_ —although I'm well aware that Andrew Scott plays a Sexy Priest in the second, and so plan to watch it ASAP—so please accept this as a massive canon divergence from the end of Season 1.

Getting her law degree was possibly the stupidest decision that Fleabag had ever made (and she had made a _lot_ of truly stupid decisions before this one). How had her brain somehow forgotten how to _think_ between graduating uni the first time and going back to school?! And fuck all of the obnoxious little arseholes around her, in their late teens and early twenties, who knew all the answers before class even began and always had their hands waving in the air. Fleabag may have been slower to pick up on things, but she was pretty sure that none of the Hermione Grangers surrounding her had been shagged once since the programme had started. (Not that Fleabag's life had been particularly active on that front since being reminded that studying took up so much time and energy, to be perfectly fair. But there still was plenty of footage of Barack Obama on YouTube, so, things could be far worse.)

Still, she somehow made it through the ordeal, with respectable passing marks, if not flying colours. And, loath as she was to invite anyone to her graduation, she decided to be the bigger person and extend a few invitations. The Bank Manager knew that he was invited, of course, because when she'd first approached him about taking out a student loan (and about the best means of valuing and selling unique art objects), he'd laughed and joked, "Only if you invite me to your graduation," and Fleabag had told him very seriously that of course she would. Fleabag honestly wasn't sure if Claire was going to bother making her way all the way over from Finland for the weekend, but there Claire was, looking as posh and stressed as always, but smiling quite genuinely for her sister's success. And Fleabag managed to get just one hug in before Claire protested too loudly, because Fleabag was finally living up to her potential, and because Claire was off living her dreams and hopefully would never again need to worry about her newly barred sister.

She'd sent the invitation addressed only to her Dad, but of _course_ her Godmother appeared at his elbow, twittering cheerfully, drawing attention to herself, flirting casually with all of the young men in the vicinity (almost all of whom ignored her completely, thank god). Fleabag forced her face into a pained smile, shot her Dad a look that he returned with one of patient resignation, and stormed off to go find Claire.

"Jesus Christ," Claire fumed, tossing back half a flute of champagne. " _She's_ certainly in fighting form."

"Why, what did she say?" Fleabag asked, leaning against the handrail of the stairwell in which the sisters were hiding from everyone else.

"I'm not telling you, you're supposed to be happy today," Claire sniffed. "Just, the next time she does anything remotely shitty to you, please threaten her with a lawsuit and actually mean it."

Fleabag shrugged and finished off her own champagne. She sincerely hoped that her Godmother's very valuable cat had gotten run over by a car by now. The Bank Manager had departed the gathering some time ago, and since Claire was the only other person Fleabag really wanted to see here, she put her flute down on one of the steps.

"Come on, wanna go say bye to the café with me?" she asked, and Claire nodded and put down her own flute.

The café had been cleared out the previous weekend—rickety tables and chairs given away, counters and floors wiped down, all of the guinea pig paraphernalia lovingly stored in a big plastic box slipped under Fleabag's bed, with Hilary's cage balanced on top of her dresser. She'd handed over the key to building management, but Fleabag had long ago perfected the art of breaking into her own café, given the number of times she'd forgotten the key and found it easier to pick the lock than go all the way back home. The two sisters walked into the empty space, streetlights outside casting a muted glow through the butcher paper covering the windows. The cleaners really had worked wonders, but the entire place still smelled slightly of Hilary, which made Fleabag unaccountably proud.

"She'd have been really happy for you, you know," Claire said suddenly.

"I know," mumbled Fleabag, staring guiltily at the ground.

"No, look at me, Abby," Claire insisted. "Boo's dream was for the two of you to run this place _together_. Now that she's gone, she'd have wanted you to find a new dream that works for you alone. And you've done that. And she'd have been so proud of you, for learning to move on like this."

Fleabag nodded, and then broke down entirely.

"I miss her so much," she sobbed. "God, Claire, I just want to learn how to be as good a person as she always thought I was."

And Claire hesitated for only a few moments before tentatively wrapping her arms around Fleabag and letting her little sister—who was going to be a barrister, but who would still always be a bit of a disaster—sob into her shoulder.

* * *

Fleabag had hated reading law, but she _loved_ practising it. Litigation was as flashy and confrontational as dropping entire platters of wine glasses onto the floor of an art gallery, only it was infinitely more socially acceptable. Fleabag revelled in the fact that she got to metaphorically bloody people's noses with her words, and that people _praised_ her for fighting tooth-and-nail so brilliantly, for excelling in her robed savagery. She didn't love the wigs—not her best look, nor anyone's best look, really—but she was interested to find that the stodginess wasn't nearly as much of a blow to her vanity as she would have expected.

And, to her shock, although she was no longer constantly having sex, Fleabag likewise didn't miss it nearly as much as she would have expected. For one thing, she was always, always busy; and she often found it more productive to spend the evenings reviewing documents, or just catching up on sleep, than prowling pubs for a promising shag. But moreover, Fleabag was finding her career to be oddly self-empowering, such that she didn't _need_ men to tell her that they wanted her, for her to feel valued and important. Sex had been a means of survival for Fleabag in the past, a way for her to confirm that she was still breathing and worth something to someone, at least for a night. Now that Fleabag was discovering just how much power and worth she had in a courtroom, any sex in her future was going to be on her own terms, entirely because she _wanted_ someone, and not simply because he was the best or only convenient option.

A few years into her legal career, Fleabag picked up a juicy little case out in Dorset, defending a man who had confessed to murdering his son's best friend in the midst of their adulterous affair. _It's just like a crime show, Boo_ , she thought on the train ride out to Broadchurch, the wintery countryside blurring into smears of green and brown outside her window. Hilary had passed on to guinea pig heaven the year prior, and Fleabag found herself talking increasingly to Boo directly, now that her last tangible link to her best friend was finally gone and she had nothing left but her memories. (Well, she did still have all of the guinea pig art under her bed. But Fleabag wanted to keep her place vaguely presentable for when she did occasionally bring men home; and she somehow felt that Sharon wouldn't appreciate guinea pigs all over the walls of her chambers, either.) Boo didn't reply, of course, so Fleabag settled back and kept reviewing the case files with the scenery flying by. This would be a quick and easy little matter—routine guilty plea, nothing noteworthy—but it would be fun to make it out to the West Country for a day or two, before returning to the daily grind of London.

But then everything went wrong.

Joe Miller pleaded not guilty, most obviously. Fleabag _hated_ being blindsided like this; she'd become a barrister so that life would _stop_ throwing unpleasant, embarrassing surprises at her, after all. And she was on the verge of telling Joe Miller that he could go fuck himself, she wasn't gonna help him find a QC to drag this bullshit out any longer... but then, as she passed the entrance to the ladies' room, she heard an all-too-familiar voice shout, "Christ's sake, did you put that there?!" and stopped dead in her tracks as a woman with tears streaking down her face stormed out.

No. It couldn't be.

Fleabag was still staring as a scruffy man edged around the cleaning sign and followed the woman down the hall, calling after her, "Miller! Hey, Miller, wait!" And even though it was completely and totally irrational, Fleabag felt bile rising in her throat, her heart suddenly pounding with pure venomous hatred for the wife of her client. The cop who'd kicked the shit out of him while he was in custody. The woman who somehow looked _exactly_ like Fleabag's fucking Godmother.

Shaken, Fleabag made her way to the back rooms of the courthouse, to where her client was waiting. And even though he'd stitched her up, when he asked her to find someone to take his case, she nodded. Objectively, Fleabag _knew_ that Ellie Miller was not her Godmother, however eerily identical. But, fuck it, defending Joe Miller just to spite the woman was gonna feel really bloody good, anyway.

And so Fleabag went back to London and talked Sharon into taking on the case, even though she knew that Sharon was dealing with plenty of shit in her personal life at the moment. She stayed up late poring over the records, writing out long lists of suggestions for how to go about their defence (all of which Sharon ignored, of course, but it still made Fleabag feel useful). When they finally went out to Dorset, and Sharon sat down to grill Joe Miller, and it was suddenly so _obvious_ that his confession had been genuine, Fleabag's stomach clenched with guilt. But Sharon reminded her calmly that this was about _process_ , that even a guilty man deserved his defence; and Fleabag nodded, wishing that all of this really were about justice and not about her own petty, personal revenge.

Because every time she saw Ellie Miller in the courtroom, all that Fleabag could see was her Godmother in her stupid hair scarf, chirping inanities at her and Claire as they tried to commemorate their mother's life, or handing her the platter of wine glasses as if she were a server instead of a part of the family. ( _She's less of a Godmother than a Wicked Stepmother_ , Fleabag had reflected then, as she had so many times previously.) Thank god she still had Claire, but Fleabag wanted her _Dad_ back, too—wanted to be able to sit down alone with him and have long conversations about meaningful things, wanted reassurance that he still really loved her even if he had to hold her at arm's length while recovering from the loss of her mother, wanted even to be able to go upstairs in the fucking house where she'd grown up without feeling like she was trespassing. Fleabag's god-awful Godmother had stolen all of that; and even if Fleabag _knew_ that Joe Miller had stolen something far, far worse from his family and friends, she still smirked vindictively as she watched Sharon place the woman with her Godmother's face on the witness stand and then ruthlessly tear her apart.

Fleabag had become a barrister to reinvent herself and avoid her past mistakes, and she succeeded, to an extent. When Olly Stevens pursued her through the streets, teasing her about her wig but making it quite clear that he found her very attractive regardless, how could she say no? It wasn't purely because she hadn't had sex in such a long time and really deserved it, and that Olly was the only remotely worthwhile option in this entire town. Fleabag was more discriminating than that now, and she thought (correctly) that it'd be a good time shagging Olly, even before she spotted the bank statements and realised exactly how good of an idea it had been. _Look at me, Boo_ , she thought as she walked back to the Traders in the middle of the night, having been unceremoniously chucked out of Lucy Stevens's house. _I'm being selective about the people I shag, and it's paying off professionally, too!_

But Boo didn't answer, because Boo was dead; and it was all Fleabag's fault, for having been so selfish as to seduce the love of Boo's life. She sat on her bed in the Traders for an hour when she got back, feeling remarkably sad and empty and lost, considering what a satisfying evening with Olly it had been. She didn't work her way out of her funk until the next morning, when she brought up to Sharon that they should check the joint bank statements, and the reminder that she was doing all of this to get back at her Godmother's doppelgänger buoyed her once more with vengeful motivation.

Fleabag could tell that they were going to win. The prosecution was playing it too _nice_ , all propriety and grandeur, completely unwilling to strip down to their bare knuckles like she and Sharon were. Fleabag had been on the losing side of life's boxing matches too many times to care about propriety; she took one look at Jocelyn Knight, who looked and acted for all the world like she'd been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and resented her immediately for all that privilege. She could see why Sharon hated Jocelyn so much, because Sharon too had done her years of waiting tables at restaurants to put herself through uni, had coped with the chaos of losing people and crying over her loved ones' mistakes. And Fleabag couldn't wait to see the look on Jocelyn's face when this entire circus was over, and she and Sharon (the less-prestigious underdogs, who weren't lovable but _were_ effective) had carried off a win that no one thought possible.

But it still cut her deeply, to hear Ben Haywood call her a truly horrible person—Ben Haywood, who reminded her uncomfortably of sweet, earnest, vulnerable Harry, who wouldn't say such things unless he believed that they were absolutely true. She turned his words over in her mind on the train ride back to London, the flush of victory gone all too soon, leaving her with nothing more than a desire for her own bed and the lingering fear that he was right. Was it possible that, despite the years of legal education and the stupid wig and the infinitely better income, she was still just the same Fleabag that she had always been, making the same mistakes, hurting people in the same way?

* * *

Sharon, to Fleabag's amazement, was _cheerful_ when she arrived at work on Monday. It made sense that she'd get a thrill out of besting her former boss; but she was _humming_ to herself as she sorted through all of the files piled up on her desk and tossed some of them into the recycling, and Fleabag didn't think that Sharon hated Jocelyn Knight quite _that_ much.

"Everything all right?" she asked.

"Did you see the folder that I left on your chair?" Sharon replied. "Looks like it could be promising. I have a phone meeting in a few; look it over while I'm on, so we can discuss after?"

Fleabag slouched over to her desk and moved the folder so she could sit down. She knocked on Sharon's door when she was finished, thinking that Sharon's meeting was over, and pushed the door open just as Sharon said into her phone, "Hang on, Jocelyn—Abby, five more minutes, please?" And Fleabag retreated back to her own desk, somewhat bewildered, because surely Sharon wasn't chatting on the phone with Jocelyn Knight?! (Fleabag wondered vaguely if Sharon had just cut her out of a half-hour of remote gloating, then decided that Sharon wouldn't be so unkind as to deny her junior such petty victories.)

"What was _that_ all about?" she asked Sharon, when Sharon appeared at her door a few minutes later.

"Strategy meeting," Sharon explained. "Jocelyn's joining Jonah's defence team."

Fleabag stared.

"But you _hate_ each other!" she pointed out.

"Yeah, well, sometimes you have to know when to bury the hatchet," Sharon shrugged. "The Miller trial's over, time for a new start."

Fleabag still was completely unconvinced, and she assumed that her face was showing it. Sharon sighed.

"Look, by now, you've probably picked up on the fact that Jocelyn and I have been holding onto a lot of anger and resentment towards each other, for a very long time. It's not going to be easy, learning to work together again, after everything we've put each other through. But I think it's probably very healthy for us both, if we do our best to forgive and forget, and move on from there. I feel loads better already, and not only because my son suddenly has a better shot with his appeal than he's had in years."

This abrupt turnabout was making Fleabag's head hurt, so she went back to reviewing the new case. That evening, she took a long walk around the darkened streets of London and called Claire on WhatsApp.

"Heard you won that big murder trial," Claire said by way of greeting. "Congratulations."

Fleabag stopped and leaned against the railing, looking out over the Thames, the lights of the Tate Modern twinkling onto the surface of the water from behind her.

"I shouldn't have," she said, her voice catching. "Damn it, I shouldn't have even pressed my boss to take the fucking case!"

"Abby?" Claire sounded mildly panicked at Fleabag's sudden hysteria.

"I thought I was doing so much better," Fleabag sobbed into her phone. "I thought I was starting to be more like _you_ , with a career and a sense of purpose, and... and I'm not, Claire. I'm still just as much of a fuck-up as I was before I became a barrister. Only now, when I hurt people, everyone just pats me on the back and tells me it was all part of the course of justice. I feel truly horrible."

"What happened?" Claire asked.

"This case," Fleabag sighed. "Only reason I kept it was because my client's wife looked just like You-Know-Who. And I wanted to hurt her as much as possible. Even though I _knew_ she wasn't the same person, even though I knew it wasn't at all fair, and even though I knew he was probably guilty! What kind of a person goes ahead and ruins the lives of a bunch of strangers, just because she can't _actually_ hurt the bitch who's made her existence a living hell, these past few years?"

Claire said nothing. Not that Fleabag had really expected her to, anyway.

"And I'm still just so _angry_ , all the time," she continued. "Except now the anger's all burnt out, and I just feel hollow and sad. It's like I have to be so angry with the rest of the world that I burn other people, if I don't want to have to confront just how empty I feel inside. Boo would be so disappointed."

Because, if she was honest with herself, the last time Fleabag felt like that empty space was filled was when she still had Boo, when she still had a best friend whose presence and warmth and good humour would keep Fleabag afloat through all of her professional woes and romantic misadventures. Jesus, she'd made a mess of everything good in her world.

"Boo would still love you," said Claire quietly. "For trying to be better, in the first place." She paused. "I do."

Fleabag let out a choked laugh.

"Who are you, and what've you done with my sister Claire?" she asked.

"Oh, shut up, why do you always have to be like this when I'm trying to be nice?" huffed Claire impatiently. "Look, you can't change what you've done, but maybe you can at least apologise? It won't solve things, but it's probably a first step."

Fleabag sighed. A first step to _what_ , though? It wasn't like the Latimers were ever gonna forgive her for what she'd done; if she were in their shoes, Fleabag knew that she certainly wouldn't, that she probably wouldn't even open the damn message once she saw the sender's address. But who the hell knew? If Sharon Bishop and Jocelyn Knight had been willing to make amends for whatever shit they'd done to each other, over the years, then maybe such things were possible. It probably couldn't hurt for Fleabag to at least _try_ to hold herself accountable for the pain she'd caused others, for once.

"Okay, yeah, fine," she agreed. "Thanks for the eminently reasonable advice."

"Any time. And Abby?"

"Mmm?"

"You're still allowed to be angry about things," Claire reminded her. "I certainly am. But I took up kick-boxing for more reasons than just to tone my arse. Maybe you should do something similar, instead of misdirecting your anger at innocent people and especially at yourself?"

"Does statuette theft count as an acceptable hobby?" Fleabag asked, only half-joking.

"Look, I have to go," Claire sighed, "but take care of yourself, okay?"

"Yeah, you too," said Fleabag, and she hung up her mobile and slipped it back into her pocket. She stood contemplating the illuminated dome of St Paul's across the river for a few more minutes, thinking about Boo, thinking about all of the things that she'd done wrong in her life. Thinking about how her bloody Godmother's sneers and snide comments and cattiness probably wouldn't get to her nearly so much, if Fleabag could only manage to forgive herself for her many, many failings and learn to like herself a bit more. Maybe Claire was right. It was worth a go, at least.

On her way to the nearest Tube station, Fleabag slipped into a shop and bought two cards, one for the Latimers and one for Ellie Miller. For a wild moment, she considered buying a third for her Godmother, but she decided against. After all, apologising sincerely to people who had never actually done her any wrong seemed like a manageable first step. It would be a project for further down the line, to work on slowly killing her Godmother with kindness and magnanimity and forgiveness. (And, Fleabag mused as she stepped out of the shop, possibly also poison, just for good measure.)


End file.
